QandO: Energy and Progress

August 30, 2004

Energy and Progress
Posted by Jon Henke

In a post last week, I'd noted some very interesting progress being made in the field of alternate-energy development....

Via Dean Esmay, here's some potentially good energy news...

A team of Australian scientists predicts that a revolutionary new way to harness the power of the sun to extract clean and almost unlimited energy supplies from water will be a reality within seven years.

Using special titanium oxide ceramics that harvest sunlight and split water to produce hydrogen fuel, the researchers say it will then be a simple engineering exercise to make an energy-harvesting device with no moving parts and emitting no greenhouse gases or pollutants.

It would be the cheapest, cleanest and most abundant energy source ever developed: the main by-products would be oxygen and water. Rooftop panels placed on 1.6 million houses, for example, could supply Australia's entire energy needs.
Meanwhile, the biomass-to-oil project is continuing apace.

In May, Renewable Environmental Solutions (RES) said its first commercial plant is selling oil -- equivalent to crude oil No. 4 -- produced from agricultural waste products. The plant currently produces 100 to 200 barrels of oil per day using byproducts from an adjacent turkey processing facility.
[...]
At peak capacity, estimated to occur by the end of this year, the first plant will produce 500 barrels of oil per day, as well as natural gas, liquid and solid fertilizer and solid carbon.

Are these the solutions to our energy problems? Who knows? I remember some scientists a couple decades ago swearing up and down that they had created cold fusion in a jar. Whatever happened to those guys, anyway?

Regardless, it's exactly something like this that I believe will render our current environmental and economic energy-related fears an anachronism of another age. With the advancing pace of technology, I fully expect we'll see some serious progress within a couple decades, and implementation within a decade or two after that.

With these advances in technology, the Kyoto Treaty will eventually look a bit like a fellow trying to sell horse carriages right about the time the Model T was being produced.

So, the biomass-to-oil project, and a hydro/solar project show great potential. That's all very heartening, but what brings this up again is an email I got in reference to my question about those cold-fusion scientists.

Apparently, via reader Eric, we know "whatever happened to those guys"....at least, one of the proponents of cold fusion, if not the original University of Utah scientists. Eugene Mallove died--was murdered, actually--just months ago.

Oddly, this occurred just about the time there has been renewed interest in the "Cold Fusion" idea....

Three months ago, the US Department of Energy quietly agreed to examine what cold fusion supporters say is increasing evidence -- culminating at a conference at MIT last summer -- that the reaction exists and is reproducible. If the agency agrees, it will likely mean an injection of both funding and legitimization for the forgotten research.

The entire article is a fascinating look at a scientist who may become either an Einstein, Reolutionary Physicist....or a modern day alchemist, spending his life on the impossible.

Is there anything to it? I'm certainly unable to say--sure, I've read Stephen Hawking, but mostly so I could leave the book laying about where people might see it--but one has to believe that it's exactly these kind of researchers--and not a government program to mandate fuel standards, etc--who will drag us out of the age of dangerous dependence on Middle Eastern oil. Those magnificent scientists in their flying cars.

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Comments

Unfortunately, the Cold Fusion field has been dominated by cranks chasing after pots of gold at the end of the rainbow for so long that it is even harder to say for certain. The current trends that I had seen recently revolve around an effect known as sonoluminescence. It has been known for a long time that under the right conditions, you can build sonically driven shock waves in a specially prepared liquid that result in light production with picosecond time constants that are thought to result from high temperatures, possibly exceeding 10,000 degrees C. The light is emitted from bubbles that are typically a micron across, and the pressures may be very high.

Could it result in fusion? Who knows.... it certainly merits a few hundred kilobucks per year to study since the mechanism of sonoluminescence is still unknown. I'm suspicious from the standpoint that cold fusion seems to have migrated into fields that are unknown. If and when sonoluminescence is figured out and cold fusion there is debunked, perhaps they will be seeing cold fusion in this or that next unsolved field.

Posted by: pdq332 at August 30, 2004 01:59 PM

From the article: "Today, cold fusion is as scientifically scorned as UFOs."

Just another example to give the lie to the old, odd notion that Science is always ready and willing to stand aside and welcome new ideas.

Even Sagan, that benevolent proponent of scientific openmindedness, was one of the first on the bandwagon to drag Velikovsky through the mud.

It wasn't so much that V's ideas were wrong, it was that he had the temerity to suggest something that hadn't already been blessed by the official journals of reason. (And he wasn't one of Them.)

Posted by: Mike at August 30, 2004 03:20 PM

Thanks for pointing to that article. Very interesting.

Posted by: michael at August 31, 2004 02:31 AM